Immigrant Dramatists

Today there were protests all across the United States in support of immigrants, so I wanted to blog about some of the great American dramatists who were immigrants:

Dion Boucicault - Born in Ireland, Dion Boucicault moved to England where he rose to fame with his play London Assurance, which Madame Vestris produced at Covent Garden. After a string of hits in London, he moved to New York, where he conquered Broadway with his melodrama The Poor of New York. The play was actual adapted from a French work, but Boucicault went on to write the quintessentially American play The Octoroon, which Branden Jacobs-Jenkins recently adapted for the 21st century. Boucicault is perhaps the first truly great American playwright. (Though you could argue for the French-born Anna Cora Mowatt.) And, of course, he was an immigrant.

Kurt Weill - Don't you love "Mack the Knife," "September Song," and "The Saga of Jenny"? All of those hit Broadway songs were written by the German immigrant Kurt Weill. "Mack the Knife" of course came from The Threepenny Opera, which Weill originally wrote in Berlin with Bertolt Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann. Being as he was a gay Jewish leftist, Weill had to flee Hitler's Germany, first to Paris, then London, and eventually New York. That's where he collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on Knickerbocker Holiday, which gave us the jazz standard "September Song." "The Saga of Jenny" comes from Lady in the Dark, and featured lyrics by the all-American Ira Gershwin, who was--incidentally--the son of immigrants.

Maria Irene Fornes - Born in Cuba, Maria Irene Fornes moved to New York in the 1950s. Her play Fefu and Her Friends has become a modern classic. I've always been a fan of her brutal one-act play The Conduct of Life, and spoke about it when she received the 2015 Edwin Booth Award. Recently, the Signature Theatre produced her short play Drowning, which reimagined a story by Anton Chekhov, but was told from the point of view of aliens from outer space. Fornes wasn't from outer space, but she was once an alien to this country, before become one of America's great playwrights of the 20th century.

Nilo Cruz - Speaking of Cuban-American playwrights, Nilo Cruz, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his drama Anna in the Tropics, was born in Matanzas in Cuba, but immigrated to Miami as a child when his parents fled communism. Cruz's play Sotto Voce tells the story of a woman mourning the failure of both Cuba and the United States to take in Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. As a former refugee himself, Cruz certainly knows the importance of showing compassion to those who arrive on your borders.

Martyna Majok - And who won the most recent Pulitzer Prize for drama? That would be Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok. I haven't seen The Cost of Living, which garnered her the award, but her play Ironbound is wonderful, and deals quite poignantly with coming of age in urban America.

So thank you, immigrants. You make America great!

Possibility of Imagination

Cherríe Moraga begins the printed version of her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea with a quote from the German feminist Christa Wolf:

Where can I go?
is it possible to imagine a world,
a time, where I would have a place?
There’s no one to ask.
That’s my answer.

For Moraga, it is not only impossible to create world that accepts her--it is impossible to even imagine such a world.

The Hungry Woman takes place in the future, after the failure of a utopian state known as Aztlán that was supposed to create a homeland for people of indigenous ancestry living in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. In her notes for the program, Moraga states that “Rebels scorned the ballot box” and that after the revolution individuals without native blood were “permitted to reside” in the new country, but the right to hold land was generally reserved for people who could certify they had native ancestry. Those who were not ethnically native in this non-democratic state were essentially second-class citizens, permitted to live (at least for now) within the borders of the native homeland.

Substitute “German” for “native” in this scenario, and the supposedly utopian state of Aztlán begins to sound an awful lot like the Third Reich. Though Moraga is sympathetic toward her fictional revolution, she makes the parallels between Aztlán and Nazi Germany fairly explicit. The character of Chac-Mool is also named Adolfo, a clear reference to Adolf Hitler, and in a conversation with a Border Guard, Chac-Mool claims, “I was born to be a Nazi, to have a Nazi life.” The fascist turns both he and the nation take in the play are inherent from the beginning. When a revolution is founded on an inborn ethnic link to the land--or “blood and soil” as the Nazis put it--how can anything go right?

What Moraga seems to be expressing is an inability to dream, an inability to even imagine a better world. Like Christa Wolf, she sees no political movement of the past that has been able to create a place for people like her. There is no one to ask how something could be done, so the implied conclusion is that nothing can be done. Women like Moraga’s Medea are condemned to always dwell on the borders, never truly finding a place for themselves. A world where they might find happiness cannot even be imagined.

This inability to dream, an inability to even imagine a better world, also haunts Nilo Cruz’s new play Sotto Voce, which closed recently at Theater for the New City. The character of Bermadette, though a famous novelist, is unable to write about the fate of her former lover Ariel who failed to escape from Germany on the eve of World War II and was in all likelihood murdered during the Holocaust.

Bermadette, it seems, needs to tell Ariel’s story, to imagine him on the ship leaving Germany, and to perhaps dream of what his life might have been like had he escaped. Paralyzed with guilt and regret, she walls herself up in her Manhattan apartment, unable to leave, and also unable to write anything new. She knows that Ariel is almost certainly dead and that there are no other reasonable possibilities, so she cannot even fantasize about his possible life. Yet this inability to dream prevents her from living her own life as well.

Cruz offers a way out for Bermadette by introducing the character of Saquiel, a young Cuban writer trying to get the governments of the U.S. and Cuba to apologize for not taking in refugees from the S.S. St. Louis, the ship that carried Ariel back in 1939. Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of politics must know that getting the governments of the United States and Cuba to issue a joint apology for anything is nothing other than a dream, but at least Saquiel has a dream. He relentlessly stalks Bermadette, calling, sending her electronic messages, and even standing outside her apartment building. Gradually, Bermadette warms to the young man. She even takes to calling him “Ariel.” Through Saquiel, Bermadette is able to enter an imaginative space where Ariel did in fact live.

For a writer like Moraga or Wolf, the creation of such an imaginary world might seem pointless and escapist. In Cruz’s play, however, it is Bermadette’s salvation. By remembering Ariel again and imagining him alive, she is presumably able to break through her writer’s block, which has yielded only pages and pages that she has thrown away as trash. She is also able to enjoy life again and venture beyond the confines of her apartment. The final image Cruz leaves us with is Bermadette dreaming of Ariel (played by the same actor as Saquiel) sailing off into a dreaming sunset—a happy ending that never was but that is necessary for her own psyche.

Franca Sofia Barchiesi as Bermadette and Andhy Mendez as Saquiel in Sotto Voce by Nilo Cruz. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.